Mark Rich remembrance: Engineer, pilot, father, friend

Friends, family and colleagues came from all over the country, and even from France, to celebrate the life of Mark Rich of Menlo Park on Aug. 26 in a way that his wife, Laura Rich, said Mr. Rich would have appreciated.

They hiked on the Stanford Dish trail and then gathered at the beer garden named the Alpine Inn, but known by all as Rossotti’s or Zott’s.

“He loved hiking the Dish,” said Laura Rich. “He loved Zott’s.”

“It was perfect. He was a very casual person and he would have appreciated that we were true to who he was; that we raised a beer in his honor.”

Many of those who came that day — a week after the Aug. 19 afternoon when Mr. Rich died when his plane crashed just outside of Madras, Oregon, as he headed to watch the total solar eclipse — were former colleagues.

Some of them had worked for multiple employers with Mr. Rich, whose workplaces included Bell Labs, SRI International, Google, DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and, most recently, Airbus.

Loyal to friends, colleagues

“He was intensely loyal to the people he worked with,” Laura Rich said. “If he thought you were good and knew your stuff, he did not forget you” and often convinced a new employer to hire former colleagues, she said.

“He was intensely personable and fun. He made friends and kept them forever,” she said. “Lots of childhood friends flew out.”

Mark Rich was born in Denver, Colorado, on Dec. 19, 1958, to Al and LaVone Rich, but lived there only a few months. The family moved several times, spending the most time in Neenah and Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.

In high school, Mark worked at the Fawn Restaurant in Sturgeon Bay one summer as a line cook, from midnight to 6 a.m., Ms. Rich said.

“It was really quiet until the bars got out, and he was bored,” she said, so he pulled out his father’s college calculus textbook “and worked through it, for fun.”

When high school started back up, Mark took the final calculus exam, getting every answer right. It allowed him to get an undergraduate electrical engineering degree from Michigan Tech and a Stanford master’s degree in electrical engineering without ever having taken a calculus class, Ms. Rich said.

“Mark truly was one of the great minds of our time,” Ms. Rich said. “He was truly, unbelievably, brilliant.”

Change the world?

In Mr. Rich’s first year at DARPA, during which he got four projects off the ground, his boss told him “clearly you understand the type of things we’re looking for” and offered him a challenge: “What I want you to do is change the world,” his boss said.

“I have some ideas,” Mr. Rich told his wife. He took on “a project he could barely tell me about. But he said it had the potential to change the world,” she said.

“Not only was he brilliant, but he was really creative.”

At SRI International, where he worked for 15 years, he became director of the special communications lab, and was “one of the leading authorities in the world on meteor burst communications,” studying in depth how to bounce communications off the dust surrounding meteors, Ms. Rich said.

Mr. Rich was 58 and would have turned 59 in December. “We were starting to plan his 60th,” Ms. Rich said. “My daughter wanted to helicopter onto a glacier” with her dad, and then to kayak on the glacier with him. He would have loved it, Ms. Rich said.

Building the plane

Mr. Rich, “just intellectually and physically craved the edge,” Ms. Rich said. “It wasn’t enough for him to get a pilot’s license. He wanted to build the plane.”

The plane he built — and was flying when it crashed and burned near the top of a canyon about a mile from the Madras, Oregon, airport — a single engine Wheeler Express, was “his pride and joy,” Ms. Rich said.

He first saw the plane at a flight show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 29 years ago, deciding “it was absolutely beautiful and he wanted to build it,” she said. She told him he first had to get his pilot’s license “because we weren’t going through that if he didn’t like to fly.”

He did like to fly, and the kit for the plane was delivered when their daughter, now 27, was a month old. “He built it in the garage,” she said, then shipped the completed wings and fuselage to the factory, where he did the final assembly.

“He loved that plane. He spent two years painting it,” she said. “He’d come home from a trip and he’d say hi to me, and say hi to the dog, and go play with the plane in a hangar.”

“We flew all over,” she said. “We’d get up in the morning and fly to the Sierras and fly back” after brunch, she said.

This year, Mark Rich planned to fly his plane to the Oshkosh show in which he’d first seen it, so he could show it off. But work got in the way, and he didn’t find the time, Ms. Rich said.

She said the National Transportation Safety Board investigator told her they may never know why the accident occurred. Most of the evidence was destroyed by the fire. “There were a lot of witnesses, but there were a lot of conflicting stories,” she said.

“He was extremely healthy,” she said and “could have designed the equipment” running the plane. “He was not a man who panicked. He was always in control and he had had acrobatic training” and was up to date on all his certifications, she said.

Jumping in full bore

His other avocations including scuba diving (which he learned to do in Lake Michigan in the winter), skiing, target shooting and wood working.

“He loved fine wine, fine food, fine whiskey; he loved bourbon,” Ms. Rich said. “If he got interested in something, he embraced it and jumped in full bore.”

“We loved collecting wines and learning about them,” she said, perhaps because it’s a subject that can never really be mastered. “The minute you thought you got your hands around something, there’s a new terroir, a new year,” she said.

“He loved that; he loved being challenged by trying to understand the underlying foundation of something, and how does it change and adjust over time.”

When Mark Rich was in Washington, D.C., while working for DARPA, he was surrounded by American history “and got intrigued and decided he was going to read the biography of every president,” she said. “He made it to Gerald Ford. He didn’t quite finish, but he lived the others.”

Mr. Rich’s current job, at Airbus, brought together planes, creativity and communication, “everything he loved,” she said. He had been recruited by a co-worker from DARPA and Google, and assigned to look forward 10 years “reimagining all communications for planes.”

“It was an opportunity that was so exciting, and he just loved brainstorming and imagining,” she said.

33 years in Menlo Park

Laura and Mark Rich met at Stanford University, when she was 19 and he was 23. They married two weeks after her graduation, and moved to a home they had bought in Menlo Park, where they have lived for 33 years.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Rich is survived by son Tyler and daughter-in-law Kathryn Rich of Austin, Texas; daughter Michelle Rich of New York City; parents Al and LaVone Rich of Arnold, Missouri; brother Tim Rich of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and sister Janel Rich Grillo of Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Laura Rich said their daughter tells a story she feels sort of encapsulates Mark. “She’s an adventurer, big time,” like her father, Ms. Rich said. Once Michelle couldn’t decide if she should go on a trip or not.

“Finally, he said, ‘Michelle, just buy the damn ticket,'” Laura Rich said.

“It became sort of the family motto — if you’re on the fence you do something. You jump in, you embrace it, you just buy the damn ticket.”

“That’s what he was doing in Oregon. He was just buying the damn ticket.”